The Brigade.
At 120 covers an hour, a sauté station that needs 2½ minutes per cover is busy 300 minutes in every 60. One cook cannot do it; the question is how many can.
Auguste Escoffier, running the kitchens of the Savoy and the Ritz in the 1890s, organised cooks like an army brigade: a chef de cuisine over a sous-chef; chefs de partie each heading a station — the saucier for sauces and sautéed dishes, the rôtisseur for roasts and grills, the poissonnier for fish, the entremetier for vegetables, soups and starches, the garde manger for cold food and butchery, the pâtissier for pastry — with commis cooks under them and the plongeur washing up. Each station had its own equipment and mise en place (IV.9), and a dish was assembled from the work of several, called at the pass by the chef (XXXI.2).
Modern kitchens keep the logic but compress the ranks: a line of a few stations — cold, hot (sauté and grill), fry, pastry — staffed by cross-trained line cooks who move to wherever the load is heaviest. The planning question is the same in both: how many minutes of work each cover brings to each station, how many covers arrive in an hour, and therefore how busy each cook is. A station loaded past about 80 % of its time has no slack for a rush or a mistake, and tickets start to wait (XXXI.2). The workshop staffs a kitchen.
Below: the load on each station — minutes of work per hour ÷ 60 per cook — for the covers per hour you choose, in a classical brigade (one cook per station) or a modern line (the hot line shared by the cooks you choose), against the 80 % comfortable limit (teaching minutes per cover).
- Name the stations of the brigade.
- Explain the modern line.
- Calculate a station's load.
- Staff a kitchen for its covers.
Count the minutes, then the cooks
At 20 covers an hour, a saucier needing 2½ minutes per cover is loaded 0.83 — right at the limit for one cook. At 60 covers the same station needs 2.5 cooks' worth of work: in the classical brigade it gets two commis; on a modern line the hot line needs about 8 cooks to stay under 80 %. Kitchens plan staffing from the expected covers per hour at the peak, not the daily total, because the rush is what breaks a station.
Running a station well: set up full mise en place before service (IV.9) — everything cut, portioned, labelled and within arm's reach; keep the station clean as you go; call out "behind" and "hot" when moving; and communicate with the pass. The chef de partie owns the station's quality; the commis learns by repeating its tasks until they are automatic. Cross-training is what lets a modern line survive a sick day or an unexpected rush.
Time yourself preparing one plate of a dish you know, step by step. Multiply by 30 covers and see how long one cook would need.
Terms
- Brigade de cuisine
- Escoffier's organisation of a kitchen into stations.
- Chef de partie
- The cook in charge of a station.
- Commis
- A junior cook on a station.
- Line
- A modern row of stations staffed by cross-trained cooks.
Sources
- A. Escoffier, Le Guide culinaire, 1903 (English translation, The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery, 1979).
- A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.